Add /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches. When written to, this will cause the kernel to
discard as much pagecache and/or reclaimable slab objects as it can. THis
operation requires root permissions.
It won't drop dirty data, so the user should run `sync' first.
Caveats:
a) Holds inode_lock for exorbitant amounts of time.
b) Needs to be taught about NUMA nodes: propagate these all the way through
so the discarding can be controlled on a per-node basis.
This is a debugging feature: useful for getting consistent results between
filesystem benchmarks. We could possibly put it under a config option, but
it's less than 300 bytes.
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Add a new `suid_dumpable' sysctl:
This value can be used to query and set the core dump mode for setuid
or otherwise protected/tainted binaries. The modes are
0 - (default) - traditional behaviour. Any process which has changed
privilege levels or is execute only will not be dumped
1 - (debug) - all processes dump core when possible. The core dump is
owned by the current user and no security is applied. This is intended
for system debugging situations only. Ptrace is unchecked.
2 - (suidsafe) - any binary which normally would not be dumped is dumped
readable by root only. This allows the end user to remove such a dump but
not access it directly. For security reasons core dumps in this mode will
not overwrite one another or other files. This mode is appropriate when
adminstrators are attempting to debug problems in a normal environment.
(akpm:
> > +EXPORT_SYMBOL(suid_dumpable);
>
> EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL?
No problem to me.
> > if (current->euid == current->uid && current->egid == current->gid)
> > current->mm->dumpable = 1;
>
> Should this be SUID_DUMP_USER?
Actually the feedback I had from last time was that the SUID_ defines
should go because its clearer to follow the numbers. They can go
everywhere (and there are lots of places where dumpable is tested/used
as a bool in untouched code)
> Maybe this should be renamed to `dump_policy' or something. Doing that
> would help us catch any code which isn't using the #defines, too.
Fair comment. The patch was designed to be easy to maintain for Red Hat
rather than for merging. Changing that field would create a gigantic
diff because it is used all over the place.
)
Signed-off-by: Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
